[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 31 (Tuesday, February 25, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H1928-H1935]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VALUES
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 3, 2013, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader,
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized
and to address you here on the floor of the United States House of
Representatives. Of all the things that are on my mind that I would
like to express to you, I know that there are also a good number of
things on the mind of the gentlelady from Florida, and so I would be so
happy to yield as much time as she may consume to the very classy
gentlelady from Florida.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I thank the gentleman from Iowa for yielding me
this time.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge this legislative body to stand in
solidarity with the freedom seekers and the pro-democracy advocates of
Venezuela. They have taken to the streets, as you can see in these
posters, to demand an end to the rule of Nicolas Maduro's
antidemocratic measures and his failed economic policies that have
caused a shortage of basic necessities like bread, electricity, and
more, despite the vast oil wealth that the nation has.
But the harshest shortage is democracy. These unarmed freedom seekers
have predictably been met by the heavy hand of Maduro's state thugs. As
the Venezuelan forces have responded with violence, Maduro remains
intransigent. He vows to continue to unleash the National Guard on
these unarmed protesters under the false pretense of protecting the
people of Venezuela.
Montesquieu said that there is no crueller tyranny than that which is
perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice, and
that is what we see with Maduro in Venezuela. There have been over a
dozen deaths so far, Mr. Speaker, a high number of arrests, including
one of the most vocal critics of Maduro, Leopoldo Lopez, who turned
himself in even though he is facing serious, trumped-up charges. His
case caused Amnesty International to condemn Maduro, saying the charges
against Leopoldo Lopez were politically motivated and an attempt to
silence dissent in Venezuela. I agree.
I ask my colleagues to be as vocal and as engaged on the crisis of
democracy in Venezuela as they have been on the problems in Ukraine. It
is vitally important to highlight the democratic struggles of the
people of Venezuela,
[[Page H1929]]
where over a dozen pro-democracy advocates have been killed in the past
weeks as Maduro unleashed the thugs in an effort to silence the masses.
The people of Venezuela deserve better than Maduro's abuse of power,
his corruption and his antidemocratic measures, and they are pleading
for help and looking to the world, turning to the United States, to
speak out against these injustices and to help--help them as they fight
for their fundamental rights.
The United States must stand with them in this struggle. That is why,
Mr. Speaker, I have introduced a bill tonight, H. Res. 488, a
resolution that says to the people of Venezuela, to Maduro, and to the
world that the United States stands on the side of those who seek
liberty and who seek democracy in Venezuela, and that we will not
remain silent while those abuses persist.
This resolution also deplores the inexcusable use of violence against
opposition leaders and the protesters--many of whom are just students--
and the use of intimidation to try to silence dissent. H. Res. 488 also
urges responsible nations to not sit quietly by on the sidelines but to
instead stand with them in solidarity with the people of Venezuela to
actively encourage a process of dialogue to end the violence.
Mr. Speaker, this body must not remain silent on Venezuela. I urge my
colleagues to stand in support of freedom, in support of peace, in
support of nonviolence, in support of democracy, and in support of
those seeking a peaceful, democratic process in Venezuela, and to
cosponsor my resolution, H. Res. 488.
I thank the Speaker for the time, and I thank the gentleman from Iowa
for yielding me his time.
Thank you, sir.
Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from Florida. And reclaiming
my time, I will move to the microphone.
Again, Mr. Speaker, through you I am thanking the gentlelady from
Florida for raising this issue and giving me the number of the bill
that I expect to sign on in business tomorrow, H. Res. 488. I am of the
opinion that here in the House of Representatives we have too few
people that demonstrate the leadership that the gentlelady from Florida
is demonstrating tonight and taking a stand on foreign policy issues. I
am very happy to see the focus that has been brought on Venezuela from
some of the leadership that emerges from Florida.
It has caught my attention, Mr. Speaker, when I listen to the
circumstances taking place in Venezuela, I can't help but think about
essentially the sister state of Cuba and how they have led the Marxist
socialist regime in the Western Hemisphere since about 1959. I think of
this Western Hemisphere, all of it, as the domain of, as Churchill
described it from this hemisphere, Western Christendom; the foundation
of Western civilization, Judeo-Christianity; the values that come from
the Old and New Testament; the values that Christopher Columbus brought
here across the ocean, and that great footprint of the moral values and
the ethics that have emerged as part of our Old Testament values and
our New Testament values; the idea of the Protestant work ethic,
turning the other cheek and building a civilization, a society to
provide the best opportunity for salvation to glorify God and our
country and to understand, as our Founding Fathers understood, that our
rights do come from God, and to promote that. The full-throated
Americanism as the leaders of the free world, of Western Christendom,
has not been asserted strongly enough in this hemisphere, and certainly
not strongly enough in other hemispheres, Mr. Speaker. But it comes
home when you see the violence in a place like Venezuela where at least
a dozen dissidents have been killed as political enemies to the Maduro
regime, and one a beauty queen who was abducted on a motorcycle, shot
in the head, and died last week.
The tragedy that is taking place down there, I can't help but reflect
back upon my travels in that part of the world and recognizing a trip
through some of the places such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Panama,
some of the stops I made along the way. I have not been to Venezuela. I
have been to Cuba, Mr. Speaker. But one thing that I recognized is that
in South America they just don't know America very well. They don't
know Americans very well. They look to the United States as the leader
in the free world, the economic leader, the military leader, and the
cultural leader, but we watched as the beginnings and the growth of the
leftist regimes have taken hold in South America for a number of
reasons.
{time} 2000
Some is because nature and power abhors a vacuum, and we have allowed
a vacuum to take place in places like Venezuela.
In Cuba, we have sat back and watched for all these years waiting for
the biological solution to take place with the Castro brothers--and
that is the vernacular that I picked up on a trip to Cuba some time
ago.
If the United States doesn't take leadership in this hemisphere, we
are going to see some philosophy, some ideology take that leadership,
and we have seen it take place in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez seemed to be
enamored with Cuba, and we have seen Fidel Castro led the Marxist
regime in Cuba, and influenced Venezuela. It is hard to think of a
Venezuela that has been such a Marxist thorn in the side, a belligerent
Hugo Chavez, one who called our President ``the devil'' from New York
City from the United Nations, from the podium, and went on with, I will
say, a smelly description, Mr. Speaker, that was offensive to anyone on
the planet, let alone Americans.
Hugo Chavez drove that Marxist agenda in Venezuela, and then he
handed this thing over to Maduro, according to Maduro, and now we have
a second regime there, a second Marxist regime that is oppressing its
people and killing freedom demonstrators and dissidents and people that
stand up for freedom, and we have sat here without a strong voice
coming from our President of the United States. Not a condemning voice
of the violence in Venezuela, not a strong leadership that says to them
there is a reason why you are running into shortages. One thing that
the gentlelady from Florida didn't miss: a shortage of toilet paper, of
all things. Now, how can an oil-rich country that is rich enough to
promise that they are going to give free energy and fuel to Americans--
that was just a couple years ago by Hugo Chavez--and yet they can't
operate an economy that can provide the simplest necessities of life,
like some food products, or toilet paper, for example. Those things are
produced automatically and spontaneously by a demand economy that comes
from free enterprise.
If there is no product on the shelf, and say it is milk or bread--in
Cuba it is the ration of sugar and beans and rice--but if there is
nothing on the shelf in America, somebody will look around and think,
Why is that shelf bare? Why can't I buy something I want, and they will
start to produce it. If you bake a loaf of bread and put it on the
shelf, and it is of moderate quality for a moderate price, someone else
will come along and bake a better loaf of bread for a lower price, or
maybe a cheaper price of equal quality, and that competition of one
loaf of bread sitting next to the other decides. When the consumer
pulls that loaf off the shelf and puts it in their grocery cart, that
is a vote for one product over another. It happens over and over again
in this country, and because of that, we walk into a grocery store in
America--and I remember the stories when the Russians first were able
to come over here and see what a supermarket looked like. It was
amazing for them to see that you could grab anything you wanted.
Then I think of my trips to places like Russia and Cuba, and it looks
to me like their societies and their civilizations are trained to stand
in line. When we went to the Duma in Moscow a few years ago on a trip,
we stood outside even though we were expected by their
parliamentarians. We waited a long time to get in line and then a long
time to get into the line where you hang your coat up. Everybody wears
a heavy coat over there. Then to get into the line again to go into the
hallway, and then get into line to go into the room, then to go into
the waiting room, and I looked around at people that were standing in
line, and it looked to me like maybe they didn't all know why they were
in line, but it
[[Page H1930]]
was what they were trained to do, stand in line. I presume when they
got to the front of line, some of them found out why they were there.
Maybe all of them knew. I didn't know the language of the culture
there. When they finished that, they would go get in another line.
It is a full-time job to go line up and wait for those things that
come to us as Americans, offered to us, some of them delivered to us,
but free people stand in fewer lines than oppressed people do. You will
see lines in communist countries far more often than you see lines in
free countries like the United States of America.
You don't want to stand in line to buy something. You don't want to
stand in line to receive something. You will stand in line for
something free from government. That happens in this country, too. You
surely don't want to stand in line to pay for something that you
already have. So you will find there is somebody working the cash
registers to move you through to get their hand on your credit card and
ring that up. That is what happens in a free country.
Lines in Russia; lines in Cuba. I recall seeing a couple of lines in
Cuba that I didn't expect to see. One of them was a line for ice cream.
As we went down the street, I looked over and here is this long line
that went for a couple of blocks. I asked our guide, What is going on
there? They have a shipment, a delivery of ice cream, and so the Cubans
are lining up to get an ice cream cone. Now two blocks to wait for an
ice cream cone? We wouldn't do that. We would walk another block to get
an ice cream cone at the competing store, or the one next to that, or
the one next to that. That is one of the differences that are taking
place.
You know, I reviewed some of the speech that was delivered by Ms.
Ros-Lehtinen's Senate counterpart, Senator Rubio, and as he spoke on
the Senate floor about doctors and about how the junior Senator from
Iowa, and that is my word ``junior,'' who traveled to Cuba and was very
happy and proud of what he had seen there and the accomplishments of
the Castros and talked about the medical system that they have in Cuba.
I think that flows from Michael Moore's movie rather than anything that
has to do with fact, Mr. Speaker, but it was stated by the gentleman
from Florida that yes, they have good doctors, doctors that are Cuban,
and many of them are the ones that defected to the United States. I
agree with that statement.
He also mentioned doctors and cabdrivers. I have experienced that. I
have hailed a cab in Havana, a legal trip to Havana, I might say, which
might have been different than the ones we are discussing, and what do
you meet behind the steering wheel? A doctor driving a taxi cab. What
was the most logical tax cab when I was there? A 1954 Chevy with a
Russian diesel engine under the hood. It looks like it is a rolling
repair shop up and down the streets, which are better than I thought
they would be. There are cars that have pulled off that break down, and
they just come along and jack them up and crawl underneath and fix them
with the parts that they can scavenge. When the car is repaired, they
drive it on again. It is part of traveling to stop and repair the
vehicle you are in. These vehicles are put together from parts from
different places.
One of the things also that I noticed was that there were Russian
tractors sitting all over the place. They are broken down, and they had
been robbed for parts. There would be a circle maybe of grass growing
up around the tires where they had been there for a long time.
Then I began to notice that there were these Brahmin oxen around the
island in a lot of places, and they are staked down with a rope. There
is a stake driven down and then a rope, so they have what I call a
pivot-grazing system for these Brahmin cattle that they are using as
beasts of burden, and I imagine raising them for the meat they get as
well, scattered all over the island. I was able to plow with a team of
Brahmin oxen. I had my NRA cap on, and I have a picture of that that I
won't forget.
But what happened in Cuba was, back in the 1990s when the Soviet
Union was going with a stronger economy than the Russians are today,
Mr. Speaker, they saw the Soviet Union meltdown going into the 1990s,
and when that happened, the subsidy for Cuba stopped. They weren't able
to continue that subsidy. What had been taking place was Cuba raised
sugar. The world market for sugar then was 6 cents a pound. The
Russians would send them oil for sugar. The Cubans would ship the sugar
to the Russians, and the proceeds from the oil would come into Cuba,
and they were getting 51 cents worth of oil for every 6 cents of sugar
they sent. That was how they propped up the government in Cuba. It was
subsidized by the Soviet Union. That was the most important equation of
it all.
When the Soviet Union imploded and shrunk back, states declared their
independence and the Russian Federation was formed a little bit over
time, the Cubans had to stand on their own. When that happened, the
subsidies stopped, so did the parts and the support for the Russian
tractors that were being used. They got parked as they broke down, and
then they were robbed for parts. It is the only economy that I know of
that has gone from an industrialized, mechanical tractor production for
agriculture back to using animals again and animal husbandry. That is
digression, and I would make that point to my junior Senator from Iowa.
Cuba digressed. It wasn't progress, it was digression. They digressed
to using animals as beasts of burden again, where once they had
tractors, albeit Russian tractors. They digressed from doctors in the
clinic and hospital to doctors behind the steering wheel of a 1954
Chevy with a Russian diesel under the hood. They digressed from a
country that had a measure of freedom, however harsh the dictatorship
was under Batista, to a nation now that has been oppressed and under a
communist dictatorship since 1959.
The Senator from Florida also mentioned that they don't have the
freedoms there, that even though there was discussion about access to
the Internet--I can tell you personally, the Senator from Florida is
right, Cubans don't have access to the Internet. I was on a trip up to
a college up in the mountains in Cuba. We rode up there in the back of
a Russian deuce-and-a-half, and it took, oh, about an hour and 45
minutes or maybe 2 hours to wind our way up there into this little
campus in what I would call hills, but they said mountains. As we were
interviewing some of the professors there and some of the students
there, I was standing next to a gentleman who was from Florida. His
parents had escaped from Cuba and still held deeds for land that they
owned, real estate that they owned in Cuba that they had never been
compensated for. He was perhaps the best interpreter that I had ever
experienced. His name is Ed Sabatini, and I hope that Ed Sabatini is
out there somewhere.
As they were talking, he was telling me what they were saying, and he
was reading their body language, their voice inflection, and what they
said and putting this together for me in real time. He was one of those
people who could talk and listen and interpret simultaneously. He was
very skilled. He said to me in the middle of this, as I was asking
questions of the Castro minders, he said, you realize that they are not
asking the questions that you are asking, because I would ask a
question to one of Castro's minders and interpreters. He would turn to
a couple of instructors at the school. He would ask a question in
Spanish and return it back to me in English. Ed said to me, You know
the minder, the Castro minder, is not asking the questions of them that
you are asking, and he is not giving you the answers that they are
returning. He is telling you something different than you would be
learning if you could understand what they were saying. No, I didn't
know that. So we broke away from that conversation.
I had asked, Do you have Internet here at this school, at this
university? It was a specific question. Their answer came back
specifically, Yes, we have Internet.
You have full access to Internet?
Yes, we do. We are in the modern world. We have full access to the
Internet.
When I learned they were not answering my questions, we moved away
and went down to talk to the some students sitting on the curb, and
began more of a rapid-fire conversation that I was catching up with a
little bit after the
[[Page H1931]]
fact. I wanted to know what this Internet looked like, tell me some
more facts about the Internet. They didn't seem to know how to answer
the question on having Internet access. We drilled in to get the
answer, and it was this: yes, they had access to Internet, and if they
had a question that they needed a response to that they would get from
the Internet, then they would formally make that request. They would
write that request out in a letter form, and put the letter in an
envelope, and when the Russian deuce-and-a-half went down the
mountainside to Santa Clara, a small city near there, they would
deliver the request in letter form, and then whoever was the minder of
the Internet would decide if they would get them the answer off the
Internet. They would apparently access the Internet, print out the
answer that they thought that the student or the instructor should
have, put that on a different Russian deuce-and-a-half after a few days
or a week, and it would wind its way back up the mountain again. It was
70 kilometers away at least, to send a Russian deuce-and-a-half down
with a letter in it to ask somebody who had clearance from Castro to go
on the Internet and get an answer back, to send a Russian deuce-and-a-
half up the mountain to a student.
That is Internet access as I saw it and heard it from the lips of
students there on that mountain school that is like an extension
school, an ag college. Some will know what the name of that school is.
When I found that out, I said I want to see out what you have. So we
went into a classroom. As we walked into the class courtroom, there
were 12 or 14 computers in there. So yes, they had computers. They were
old 386s. There were two or three students sitting at every screen, and
the instructor was teaching a course on how bad capitalism is.
Now, Mr. Speaker, I wish I had had an iPhone so I could have taken a
picture of that screen and captured it. It was in Spanish, but it was
interpreted to me this way, and this is what I can recall. There were
five points on why capitalism is so bad. They were instructing these
kids, these students, they were college-aged students, and they were
all young men, on how bad capitalism is, and one of the lessons of
these five points was a capitalist keeps all of the money and all of
the profit and takes enough just to feed the worker so the worker can
just barely survive while the capitalist gets rich.
{time} 2015
That was one of the five points, and it was those kind of Marxist
points on down the line. As we walked in, they were in the middle of
indoctrinating their students in favor of Marxism and against
capitalism.
I don't know who has seen a lesson like that take place in a
communist country. I have. It impressed me that how does a young person
in a controlled environment with controlled communication ever get the
idea that there is a whole great wonderful world out here in America?
But they have a sense of what America is like because then it turned
into a question-and-answer period. There were students that were asking
questions directly of me. Most of them had to do with agriculture. I
was answering them through Ed, the interpreter. Then at a certain
point, it became too rapid fire, and he took it over and just did the
conversation.
But here is what happened. I remember one big-faced young man sitting
in the back of the room, and he asked some of the most prescient
questions. But these questions were: Who sets the markets for your
agriculture products? And what would be the price of beans and rice and
corn, for example, and oats and wheat?
I answered him that the market sets the prices. Well, how does the
market set the prices? Well, there is a buyer that makes an offer and a
seller that decides whether or not to take it. If the seller says no,
then the buyer might decide to raise his price until they get to a
place where they agree. That was an amazing concept, and it looked like
they had never heard that before.
Then it is, well, no one sets the prices; how can that be, that no
one sets the prices? And the second thing will be, well, how often does
the price change? That can change hundreds of times a day. It changes
every transaction because the buyer and the seller can reach at a
different point down to the tenth of a penny, a hard concept for them
to understand.
Another question, who sets the price of farmland in the United
States? Well, I know about that. The market sets the price of farmland.
Another new concept was, well, no one steps in and assigns a price?
No, the buyer and the seller have to agree. That sets the price. You
can see that soaking into their minds as they were asking the
questions.
And then a question was, Why does anyone ever sell land? I had to
explain that sometimes you reach that point in life when you don't want
to work the land anymore; maybe you want to retire; maybe you want to
take your capital out and roll it into another business; maybe you want
to put it into savings; maybe you want to sell it to a neighbor who can
utilize it better and the price is high enough; maybe you are
overleveraged with a lending institution and you have to sell off a
piece of land to get liquid again; maybe the economy went bad and you
went broke and you had to sell it all before the bank foreclosed; or
maybe the bank foreclosed and then sold it all out from underneath you,
as we would say.
All of these were new concepts for these young men in this classroom
in Cuba that I had been told by Castro's minders that, yes, they had
full access to the Internet, they had computers, and they were
connected to the modern and real world.
Well, what I found out was they only had old 386's. They were sharing
them two or three at a station. They were learning on the screens of
these computers in the old font style that you would see, with that
kind of green screen with white lettering on it. They were learning the
perils of capitalism and the merits of Marxism.
So that is the kind of minds that are influenced by the Castro
regime. We have had an embargo on trading with Cuba for a long time,
and we have got a lot of years invested in it. We need to keep it in
place. We have to have the kind of leadership in this country that can
inspire people to step up and take their island back.
We need the kind of leadership in this country that can inspire the
people in Venezuela to step up and take their country back. We need the
kind of leadership in this country that will send the message and go
down and stop and visit and inspire, in country after country in this
hemisphere--even if we are only speaking about this hemisphere--to
inspire the people of Central and South America to embrace the kind of
life that we enjoy here.
The difference between the United States of America and countries in
points south isn't because we are blessed with an extraordinary amount
of natural resources that sets us apart. They have a lot of natural
resources down in Central and South America, too.
It isn't because our climate is so much preferred to theirs. They
have a favorable climate in most of their continent as well, and a lot
of people go down there because their climate is favorable to ours.
I have a cousin who spent 8 years in the Peace Corps at Tegucigalpa.
He sat in the mountains. He had the only refrigerator for miles around.
That is because he is a diabetic, and he needed to keep his insulin in
a propane-powered refrigerator.
I talked with him those years ago, and I said, what is the yield
potential for corn? Now, we will raise now over 200 bushel an acre in
our neighborhood. Down there, a decent crop back then was a little over
100 bushel. He said it has got the potential to raise 100 bushel.
What does it need? It needs fertilizer. It needs seed corn. I said,
can't you get fertilizer and seed corn down there?
After I pressed him very hard in those idealistic years when we were
still young and haven't experienced a lot of the world--and he more
than I have--and his answer was, you have to understand the mindset
when you are in subsistence agriculture as opposed to agriculture for
profit.
He grew up on a farm. He said the difficult thing you have is to try
to not get so hungry that you have to eat your seed corn. That is a
different mindset.
We do capital investment here. We wouldn't think of starting a house
and
[[Page H1932]]
building a house very often, at least, unless we had the capital lined
up to go in and build that thing and frame it up and close it in and
get it wired and get the utilities all set up, put the roofing and the
siding on, and pave the driveway. We might even sod the lawn and have
that all penciled into our deal, and then we start.
Down there, it is a different attitude. If they get a little bit of
money together, they will go buy a few bricks and put that in the wall
of the house. If they get a little more money, they do a little more.
They might be building on that house for years and years and years.
Maybe they don't ever get to live in it, but their children do. Maybe
their grandchildren move into that because they don't have access to
capital like we have because--guess what, Mr. Speaker--because they are
not capitalists. They are Marxists. They live with the oppression of
Marxism, and it has to be mind control and thought control.
If you fear that your neighbors are going to report you to the
regime, if you even fear that your family members that sit around the
supper table with you, that one of them might be currying favor with
the regime and report what you said at the supper table at night, after
a while, it disciplines your thought to not think those things anymore
because what you think eventually you might say and what you say might
get you in trouble with the regime and might get you imprisoned,
incarcerated. And then you can be the subject of the regime and have to
suffer through the incarcerations that we know of, of the dissidents
that are there in places like Cuba and Venezuela.
I am amazed that one could be impressed with what Cuba has built. I
don't know that anybody is particularly impressed with what Venezuela
has. They do have oil. They are blessed with natural resources. They
have got the wrong forum and the wrong system of government, Mr.
Speaker.
What gives people an opportunity, that gives them prosperity, that
let's them plan not only for their future and put in capital
investment, build a home, get it paid for, put some money in the bank,
have an investment for a 401(k) so that you can live comfortably in
your retirement, those things come from capitalism, from free
enterprise--a free enterprise economy. They don't come from a Marxist
state that has a central command that controls it all.
I am very troubled that the inspiration that the United States is
isn't being utilized to the extent that it needs to be. So as I look at
the void in our foreign policy and I look at a President who has made
it his foreign policy to lead from behind, and then I look around the
world and I see where is the leadership vacuum--and power abhors a
vacuum, so it rushes into that vacuum. Right now, there is a bit of a
power vacuum in Venezuela.
But I don't know that we have any kind of a plan or a strategy to
even voice that strong support for the freedom-loving people that live
in places like Venezuela and Cuba. Let our light shine, send the
message to them, get this operation going so that one day we can see
the Western Hemisphere not only just be the foundation of Western
civilization in the modern world, but it can grow and prosper, and we
can live in peace and harmony by free enterprise and free trade and
open access to everybody's market on an equal basis, not on a
preferential basis.
When we passed the free trade agreement, the CAFTA-DR Free Trade
Agreement, which is many of the Central American countries and the
Dominican Republic, that opened up markets for us. We had already given
them access to our markets. It opened up our markets.
We need to go down there now and say thank you and meet people and
build the kind of relationships necessary. An American presence--and I
mean a United States of America presence in Central and South America--
should be grown and should be expanded, and it should be part of our
strategy to strengthen our leaderships in this hemisphere.
If we do a far better job than we have done in the past, then we also
have the moral authority to strengthen our relationships outside of
this hemisphere in the Eastern as well as the Western Hemisphere.
Mr. Speaker, I am very troubled also by that strategy of leading from
behind in country after country. I am troubled that President Obama, as
he came into office, and he was elected in early November of 2008, and
on the 17th of November of 2008, then-Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker,
who is a stellar public servant and an impressive individual as far as
an Ambassador is concerned, and someone who, if you listen to him talk,
you know that he has got a deep knowledge base on that part of the
world. But Ambassador Ryan Crocker signed the agreement, the status of
forces agreement, in Iraq. In it, it just simply cleared out all U.S.
influence and all U.S. troop presence in Iraq, with the exception of a
few marines inside the Green Zone at the new U.S. Embassy.
I looked at the bases that we had established there, the airstrips
that we had established there, the billions of dollars invested in
military and logistical infrastructure. Essentially, our pledge was to
sack up our bats and go home.
I was troubled when I read that agreement. It was already signed on
November 17 when I read it. I contacted the White House and said, You
are pulling everything out of Iraq, with the exception of a few marines
in the Green Zone near the U.S. Embassy, giving away air bases.
And the answer was, We wanted to clear the field so that the incoming
President will have free rein, and we hope and expect that he will
renegotiate a U.S. presence on these bases in Iraq.
Now, I don't know the depth of the agreement that took us to that
point on November 17, 2008; I just know what that agreement said. Of
course, Obama was already elected President. Later on, he was
inaugurated January 20, the following year, 2009. He continued with
this strategy of the pullout in Iraq.
The negotiations that I think should have and had a real opportunity
to be successful failed, so that agreement of November 17, 2008,
essentially stood, and all of our military and our munitions, the
foundation for security that we had established in the entire country
of Iraq, gone, gone down to just an embassy security personnel presence
was it. All the blood, all the treasure handed over to the Iraqis who
were led by a Shi'a and Maliki.
We were advised by some of our top foreign policy people that we
shouldn't worry because Iran won't be exerting its influence in Iraq.
There is a natural tension there. We should remember that they fought a
war back in the eighties, and so they are not going to team up in a
way; they are not going to line up against American interests; they are
not going to be a thorn in our side or troublesome.
Look what happened in Iraq instead. Yes, a strong influence on the
part of the Iranians, the Iranians pushing military supplies through
Iraq, reported in the news just a couple of days ago, and also, the al
Qaeda flag flying in places like Fallujah and Ramadi, places I have
been to, places that were all shot to pieces, places where their mayors
and their local leadership said, We are going to rebuild this city, and
we are going to live in peace and prosperity.
We all know, Mr. Speaker, you can't live in peace and prosperity if
you are living underneath that black al Qaeda flag. That is a result of
leading from behind. That is a result of stepping out of Iraq and
handing that country over. That is a result of not focusing on the
negotiations necessary to establish a status of forces agreement in
Iraq that could have provided the security and the stability and the
training necessary for the Iraqis to protect themselves from the
outside influence that now has a powerful influence in those places
that were paid for, some of them more than once, and that includes
Fallujah, in American blood, Mr. Speaker. That is Iraq.
Afghanistan, the President found himself pushed into a situation
where he had to order a surge, even though he rejected the surge that
was ordered by President Bush in Iraq--and it was, by all objective
accounts, a successful surge in Iraq. President Obama, Mr. Speaker,
ordered the surge of a minimum number of troops in Afghanistan.
I recall General McChrystal laying out those numbers. I don't have
them exactly committed to memory, but something to the extent of 75,000
troops will get the job done. With 50,000
[[Page H1933]]
troops, it will take a while. There will be a greater risk, and maybe
we can get the job done. We kind of think so. And if you get down to
35,000 troops, you hope that you can get the job done.
The President opted for the lesser option and went in, in a
minimalist attitude, and leaked out there and in a slow way reinforced
our troops in Afghanistan. As soon as he ordered the surge, at the same
time, he announced when the United States would pull out.
I don't know how any military strategist would announce when they
were going to pull out. That says directly to the enemy, You have to
hold on past this date; you will no longer have anybody to fight when
they are gone.
I think, Mr. Speaker, that leading from behind has created a vacuum
in Iraq that is being filled by al Qaeda and by the Iranians and the
conflicting Iraqis again, and leading from behind in Afghanistan, that
is creating a vacuum that is being filled by the Taliban.
When we look at where this is going, I am asking, what is our
objective there any longer? What are we trying to preserve? I haven't
heard this President tell us his goal or his objective.
But I do know this: in listening to the chairman of the Armed
Services Committee in the news press conference just yesterday, how it
boiled down, is what I heard from the esteemed chairman, Mr. McKeon,
and that is this: If you are going to order our troops into battle, Mr.
President, Commander in Chief, then you owe them, you owe them your
support for them, but also for their mission. You can't say you support
the troops without also supporting their mission.
That needs to be, in a full-throated way, articulated by our
Commander in Chief. If you support the troops, you can't do so, unless
you also support their mission. If you are the Commander in Chief, you
have to articulate that mission and let them know that the sacrifice is
worth it and why the sacrifice is worth it. If you don't think so, you
have to give a different order.
{time} 2030
Those are those parts of the world.
Now I take us to Egypt, and these are the foreign policy discussions,
Mr. Speaker, the ones that we don't have very often in this Congress.
We can go a whole year and not have a debate on foreign policy.
Throughout the Middle East--Egypt and Libya and Lebanon and Israel--
these are countries that I visited with a small delegation of Members
right before Christmas, so it is fairly fresh. Egypt was a very
interesting stop. The things that I learned there and the view that I
have on Egypt don't match up with our State Department's view, which, I
think, is mirrored in an effort to reflect the President's view. Mr.
Speaker, in September, which is when we went in and met with the
interim President, Mansour, and also with General el-Sisi, the
commander of the military, it was only just June 30 through the 3rd of
July that the Egyptians had come to the streets.
I think I have to back up on the history a little bit more in that,
yes, Mubarak was a heavyhanded dictator. He was there for a lot of
years as a heavyhanded dictator. Yet he was someone we had done
business with. If you look back through the history of our relationship
with Egypt, it warmed up considerably when Dwight Eisenhower told the
British the Suez Canal is not yours. You need to move out of there, and
the Egyptians will control the Suez Canal. In '54, that built a bond
between the United States and Egypt. It was the right call on the part
of Dwight Eisenhower. The British did pull back from their operations
going on in the Suez, and it brought about a greater degree of
stability in that part of the world.
Then take us to 1979--'79 is the year, as I recall, that we began
doing joint operations with some Egyptian troops and other interests--
but with American troops--and some of them were National Guard
personnel from my neighborhood. It was joint operations in the Sinai.
We have conducted those operations since 1979, up until this year, so
we have a strong relationship with Egypt. Since 1979, their military
equipment has been, by and large--and I don't know that I can say it
has been exclusively the U.S., but it has been vastly, predominantly
the U.S. The Russian influence in Egypt has been minimal, so that is
how I want to keep it. If we are going to have peace in the Middle
East, Mr. Speaker, Egypt is an anchor that is necessary for peace in
the Middle East.
When our President went to Cairo and gave his speech in Cairo on June
9 of 2009, he seated the Muslim Brotherhood in the front row. Now, that
is something that would have been missed by me at the time because I
don't recognize the faces of the Muslim Brotherhood, but Egyptians do.
They knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, which was formed in Egypt, was
pushing to do a takeover of Mubarak, and they didn't understand why the
message that was sent by President Obama was at least implied or
implicit support for the voices of those folks sitting in the front
row. Shortly after that speech--sometime after that speech--our then-
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the statement that Mubarak
needs to be gone yesterday. The Egyptian people didn't understand why
it appeared to them that the new administration at the time was
supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and opposing Mubarak and implying
that the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood should come to power, which
is what happened.
As they demonstrated in the streets, the unrest brought it about that
Mubarak was pushed out, and into power and into elected office was the
leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was incompetence in the
government. Plus, each move that was made was assuring the Egyptians
they would never see another election again, that their individual and
their human rights that they had were going to be diminished as Morsi
strengthened his power grip on the control of Egypt. There were 83
million Egyptians, of which only 5.6 million voted for Morsi as
President. He did an incompetent job in Egypt. As the economy went into
shambles and they saw their freedom go, they thought, What could be
worse? We were better off under Mubarak. It wasn't so great, but we
were better off under Mubarak.
On June 30 of last summer, the Egyptian people emerged into the
streets. Of the 80 to 83 million Egyptians, 30 to 33 million went to
the streets to protest peacefully to remove Morsi and put in a
government of the people of Egypt.
What happened from that, after that June 30 to July 1, 2 and 3, is
that they pleaded with the military to step in and take over. At that
point, General el-Sisi and others stepped in to take over the
Government of Egypt, and they provided that stability. Yes, it was
bloody in the streets of Cairo and in other places in Egypt, but
throughout that, you saw radical Islamists who were going in, raiding
Christian weddings and slaughtering the wedding parties and others
there at churches. While we were there in September, they burned down
70. Then I learned it was as many as 100 Christian churches in Egypt.
How is it that the Christians were caught in a conflict in a mostly
Sunni country and were being attacked in that fashion?
The reason was the Muslim Brotherhood wanted the Christians to enter
into it to create more of a civil war and more chaos because they
believed that they could take power in the chaos. Instead, the
Christians said--and there are less than 9 percent who are Christians
and over 90 percent Sunni Muslims in Egypt--we are going to pray for
these people who are destroying our churches and killing us. We are
going to forgive them, and we are going to pray for peace. That was a
component that brought about the demonstrations in the streets last
summer that I mentioned from June 30 until at least July 3.
Out of that came the stability from the turmoil, however bloody, with
interim President Mansour and with General el-Sisi in command of the
military, who told us in September of last year, as did President
Mansour, We are writing a constitution, and we are going to offer it to
the people when we get it polished up and ask them to go to the polls
and ratify the constitution in Egypt. That was September when they made
that promise.
When I returned in December, shortly before Christmas, I sat down
with the chairman of the constitution committee, and I remarked as they
had written the constitution, which had been published a couple of
weeks before we got there, You promised us that you were going to
produce a constitution
[[Page H1934]]
and have it delivered to the people of Egypt in November, and I noticed
that it didn't show up until December.
He looked at me, and he said, We were only 72 hours late, 72 hours
into December. I think that is pretty good for government, don't you?
I smiled and laughed, and said, If you were in my country and asked
me a similar question, I would hope that I would be astute enough to
give a similar answer that you gave to me.
Seventy-two hours into December they produced a constitution. They
put it on the ballot after we left, which was January 14 and 15. It
passed overwhelmingly by a vote of the people of Egypt. It sets up
elections in Egypt in a couple of months and then elections for a new
President down the line, less than 3 months after that. We are seeing
the pieces being put in place.
Even though the news media reports every outburst of unrest that is
there, I see stability being anchored in Egypt, but it is not being
anchored by the leadership of our administration, and it is not being
anchored by the leadership out of our State Department. It is being
anchored by the voice of the people of Egypt and by the good judgment
of those whom they have empowered and, I think, whom they will continue
to empower in the upcoming elections.
We are told we don't have to worry about the Russians doing business
in Egypt because they don't give anything away, because they don't give
any military equipment away. They have to sell everything. If the
Egyptians don't have any money, it would seem that there wouldn't be a
calculation done for the loans that were offered out of the Saudis and
out of the United Arab Emirates, but now we have the Russians, who have
negotiated a military equipment deal with the Egyptians for the first
time that I know of since 1979 or, I will say, pre-1979. We didn't need
the Russians in Egypt. They filled a vacuum--a vacuum due to a lack of
leadership, a vacuum created by the implication that the President and
our administration is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Egyptian people ask us: Why do the Americans support the Muslim
Brotherhood? We are trying to get them out of here. My answer to them
in a press conference in Cairo twice was this: the American people do
not support the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the American people oppose
the Muslim Brotherhood.
I believe this administration is on the wrong side of the issue in
Egypt, and I think they will have to turn that giant ship of state
around slowly because the administration will have to save face. I
can't expect that the President is going to go out into the Rose Garden
and step behind the podium with the Great Seal of the United States of
America and say, ``I came to confess that I was wrong in Egypt.'' No,
there will have to be some smoke and some mirrors. If things go as well
as they can over a period of time, we can ratchet our policy around to
get behind the voice of the people in Egypt and strengthen our
relationships there--the economic relationships, the trade partnership
relationship and the military relationships--so at least they have the
equipment that we had promised them so they can fight off al Qaeda in
the Sinai.
So we say al Qaeda is growing in the Sinai, and we say to the
Egyptians, You are going to have to go short of some of the equipment
you expected from us because we don't like the idea that there was a
duly elected Muslim Brotherhood president that was so bad that 30 to 33
million Egyptians poured into the streets.
Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, if that percentage of the population--
say, roughly, 40 percent of the population--of the United States were
all in the streets on the same day? Can you imagine what that would be
like? If 125 million Americans came to the streets and stayed there
from June 20 until July 3, do you think it would bring about a change
in the policy and in the government of the United States with that kind
of unrest? That is the magnitude. I have only seen this magnitude a few
times.
I can think of a time when we had the magnitude of that kind of
response in the nation of Georgia, when the Russians went in and
invaded South Ossetia and the other client state. They went in and
invaded and occupied. It was shortly afterwards--a week or so after
that--that they had hands across Georgia, where they said a million of
the, roughly, 4 million Georgians were in the streets. I saw thousands
of them with their flags wrapped around their shoulders and their
babies wrapped up in their flags, standing together in unity. When
people come out of their homes to the tune of 25 or 40 percent of their
population, you know something is wrong, Mr. Speaker.
That didn't get the attention of this administration enough for them
to start to ratchet our policy around and get behind the voice of the
people. Still they insist that there was a duly elected Morsi, and
despite whatever happened after that, we are going to stick with the
guy because the people of the Muslim Brotherhood were sitting in the
front row, and our President gave a speech in Cairo. It sent a message,
and it was a factor in the change in power in Egypt. It was helpful to
bring Morsi to power. When Morsi came to power, the Muslim Brotherhood
was in power. They did consolidate their power, and they did begin to
shut down the rights of the people of Egypt, and the Egyptians rose up.
{time} 2045
It is because of a vacuum, and it was because of leading from behind,
and it is from having sympathy for people who carry within them the
values that are contrary to that of the United States. That is the
Muslim Brotherhood. That is just Egypt.
Now, if I go on and I look at the things that have happened in the
more than 2\1/2\ years of the Arab Spring, and in each of those things,
when the Arab Spring erupted within country after country, across North
Africa and across and around the Mediterranean, each change that was
brought about went against the interests of the United States.
But somehow, the myopic belief that I think was in the mind of Jimmy
Carter when he saw the Ayatollah Khomeini return to Iran from London,
if I remember where he was based back in 1979, another watershed year,
because there was a religious leader we ought to be supportive of him
instead of the Shah of Iran.
Look what that got us, the beginning of the radical Islamic uprising,
and we have been fighting that ever since, but not with the knowledge,
the full knowledge base of what is going on.
In Libya, you have got a civil war that really hasn't ended, it just
is suspended, and you have terrorists and radical Islamists that are
controlling Benghazi.
You hear people that go to Libya, and you get the idea that somehow
they went to Benghazi and walked around the ashes and the ruins where
Ambassador Chris Stevens and our three other heroic Americans died. But
they are not going there. They can't go there. We don't have the
security personnel to go there. Neither do the government officials
from Tripoli.
The country is divided at this point, and the terrorists are in
control of most of Benghazi, and they go into Tripoli once in a while,
and they have surrounded the Parliament and other government buildings
and exerted their control there, Mr. Speaker.
There is still a void and a vacuum. We didn't get it resolved in
Libya, in spite of all of the treasure and some of the blood that was
spilled, thankfully, not American blood.
In Lebanon, it is an even bigger mess with a less decisive future,
and you have Hezbollah controlling a significant component of that
country and standing out on the streets in their uniforms under their
yellow flags with their weapons, defiant. They are a terrorist
organization, and they are occupying parts of Lebanon, parts of the
Beirut.
The results in Israel: constantly, the pressure is on Netanyahu and
the Israelis. Don't you have a little more land that you can sacrifice
in the belief that somehow you can trade land for peace?
There is no model in history that I can find that you can
successfully trade land for peace, but still, our administration
pushes, negotiate to give up something. A two-state solution. Let's
move the Jews out of the West Bank because, after all, doesn't
everybody know that they have no business living in a place like Judea,
where they have lived since antiquity?
It is their ancestral homeland. What justice is there in pushing
people out?
[[Page H1935]]
If 20 percent of the population of Israel proper is Arab, and they
can live in peace and harmony there--remember, the fence is to keep
people out, but the 20 percent of Arabs that are inside are peaceful.
They are happy enough to live there. They vote. They serve in the
Knesset. They serve in the Supreme Court. They have a voice that many
will say is equal to that of Jews that live there. There is some
question about it.
But if they can live in relative harmony in Israel proper, why is it
that the Jews don't have a right to live in places like Gaza or the
West Bank?
Then the problem is Netanyahu; the problem is the Israelis.
I don't think so, Mr. Speaker. I think we need to be in full-throated
support with every kind of commitment necessary to bring about the kind
of solutions that promote God-given liberty and things that we know
here as American ideals.
We need to elect the next President, a very astute foreign policy
president who believes in free enterprise, who believes in the pillars
of American exceptionalism, and believes in exporting them to the rest
of the world, because we are far better off with an American policy and
a promotion of our beliefs and our ideals in other places in the world,
where they want to embrace our way of living, than we are pulling back
and allowing that vacuum to be filled by the power-hungry despots of
people like a Castro, a Chavez, a Maduro, a Putin.
That is the mission for America. It is one of the missions for
America. When the Presidential candidates come to Iowa, Mr. Speaker, I
want to ask them, speak on foreign policy, become a student of foreign
policy. Go travel, draw your own conclusions.
But, in the end, we are a world player. We have been a world player
for a long time. We need to stay a world player.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________